5/4

It's the fifth day of the fourth month. What better time is there to celebrate songs in 5/4 ?

About a year ago, when I was 100% determined that I was quitting my job, the song of the moment for me was When Your Minds's Made Up, from the movie Once.

When Your Mind's Made Up.

(My mind truly was made up. Why I didn't actually quit is another story, but at this moment I'm glad I didn't, because things got better there and got worse elsewhere.)

That song plays a central part in the movie, and we get to see it built up bit by bit through a long recording session. Though the 5/4 signature is rare, and has a reputation for sounding odd, when it is done well it can sound just as natural as 3/4.

Since it is a rare meter, it is rarely done well, especially by non-professionals. To prove that point, here is me doing Serenade by Emma Lou Diemer. (MP3)
I don't know much of her work, but the piano scores I've looked at look right up my alley, but mostly too hard for me. Very rhythmically interesting, with what appears to be an influence from Khachaturian.

The first piece I ever learned in 5/4 was In Mixolydian Mode from Bartok's collection Mikrokosmos. I had a hard time learning this one. For a long time I thought that was because it was in 5/4. I understand now that it was really hard because Bartok was making it hard on purpose. Though it starts out with a strong 5/4 feeling, very soon he starts playing with the stress, hiding the downbeats and subverting the rhythm so much that it is very hard to keep the feeling of 5. This is one of the very rare times I recorded with a metronome. (MP3)

If that doesn't sound good to you, you are not alone. I think Mr. B was thinking more of challenging the piano student more than making something that sounds good.

A few more famous examples of 5/4 actually done well are, of course, Take 5 and the theme to Mission Impossible.

Less well known, but good, are:
Science, by Sevish.

English Roundabout - XTC

River Man - Nick Drake

All I can say is, I'm glad this isn't the 7th day of the 8th month, because it will be a good while before I can play Hovhaness' Macedonian Mountain Dance at the right speed!

Stuck inside of Berkeley with the Macaron Blues Again

Macaroon day is finally here. Why am I not in Paris! Damn my lazy, non-planing-ahead ass!

This year the selection of Pierre Hermé includes the same-old same-old "Chocolate and Foie Gras", two different kinds of rose, jasmine, avocado-banana. Boring! But he's also started copying me by making one with safron and one with Campari. I'm sure his will be OK, but I did it first!

I'm still ahead of him, though. I'll be he's never made lavender-flavored, mardi-gras colored macaroons (with fleur-de-lys on top.) So there.

And oh, I just whipped up another batch for a French party tonight. Can you guess the flavor? Vanilla!

Sirens

Tuesday, I know I was supposed to be getting drunk on green beer, but somehow I took myself to a Chanticleer concert instead.

They are definitely great singers, but their normal repertoire isn't really my cup of tea. But this time they were serving up a three-course meal of young (only 30!) composers. There were pieces by Tarik O'Regan and Shawn Crouch, and they were fine, but still not getting me all worked up. And then the piece I was waiting for, Sirens by Mason Bates.

I've heard his work before twice at the Cabrillo festival. (One I loved, and one I didn't.) Both of those pieces involved electronics and orchestra. This one was pure voices. And lovely it was. There were bits with clusters of close-spaced pitches, like Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, for example:

Lux Aeterna - Ligeti

and pulsing bits that reminded me of Reich's Desert Music

Desert Music - Steve Reich

Then the movement in the Quechua language came from some other place entirely, with maracas and a bit of extended vocal technique. Overall, it was most enjoyable and I hope they record it soon!

Although the first piece was entirely in English (with text by Samuel Becket), I couldn't understand a word when I wasn't looking at the program. It could have been in Martian. I did only a little better with the second piece. But Bates set his text so clearly that I had no trouble at all understanding the English parts, and for the parts in other languages I could at least tell which language it was in. (Except, naturally, Quechua.)

I thought I might be able to go to an SF Symphony concert this Friday combining a work by Bates with the Sibelius 4th (a nice pairing), but I'm confusing March and May again!

Compuers Scare Me: part 2

I got an e-mail from e-music this morning asking me to check-out the new album by he group 0.43888888888889. What? It turns out the group is actually called 10:32 (don't ask me why) but the computer has interpreted the number wrong.

This sort of thing happens all the time with computers and it freaks me out. They control so much of our lives.

Even at this very moment my screen is blinking in and out.

Let us clear our heads with some music from a simpler era. Here is the B minor Prelude of Chopin.

Complaints

I knew it would happen sooner or later. Obama has disappointed me. At least it happened later that I thought. He sure lasted longer than Clinton, who disappointed me almost from his first day.

Despite claims that he wants to make government more open, he is refusing to release details of negotiations on an insane copyright law extension by claiming that to do so would endanger national security! Even if the proposed treaty made sense, and it doesn't, the appeal to national security is ludicrous.

Copyright is a useful concept, but it gets ridiculous at times. People who had no part in the creation of a work can fight for years over who can get paid for its use. Relatives of a deceased celebrity get to say who can or can not perform one of his pieces or can stick his name on a can of spray cheese, as may soon happen to Bob Marley. While at the same time living celebrities can do next to nothing to stop their image being plastered all over the place, and products like "Obama Fingers" can be legally sold. (I'm not sure why there were never any "Bush Nuggets" or "Clinton Balls".)

Now, for no particular reason, here is me playing "A Doll's Complaints", by César Franck. IMSLP claims it is in the public domain, if there still is such a thing.

Missing something?

Is your music missing something?

Well, if that something is cowbells or Christopher Walken, help is on the way. Through the miracle of modern technology, you can add cowbells to any song! Here, give a listen to Friend by Legendary Pink Dots.

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

This is seriously cool. Because before adding anything to the song, it has to be analyzed to find the beats and the sections and so forth. There is now an open-source api called EchoNest Remix that lets you do that sort of analysis. It is almost enough to make me want to learn to program in Python!

Repetitive Stress

This is a long post. Your listening assignment for today, Metamorphosis 4, is also pretty long. So you may as well download the mp3 now and listen while you read.

I'm all excited because Monday I finally get to hear Philip Glass' Music in 12 Parts played live.

This is a massive work. The concert will last 5 hours, including a one-hour dinner break. I was a little nervous about buying a ticket and committing myself to sit in a chair that long. I've never even listened to the whole thing at home. In the end, I couldn't pass up the only chance I'll likely ever have to hear a complete, live performance. Though written in the early 70's, this is one of the few times it has ever been performed in its entirety, and the first on the West Coast.

The effect of his early music, whether Glass likes to admit it or not, is to put the listener into a trance. It can be sheer bliss for those who enjoy it, or a maddening hell for those who don't.

Up to this point, his music really was "Minimalist", though that was never the point for him. Yes, he had removed lots of things that we had come to expect, like melody, harmonic tension and release, and big emotive gestures. But the point was never what was taken away, but what was added in rhythmic complexity, with simultaneous meters as well as abrupt sequential changes in meter and rhythm. Melodic motifs were very short, but would gradually add and remove notes, disrupting our expectations of a smooth pulse.

This piece was a comprehensive index of all those rhythmic techniques created up till that time. For ever after, he has been gradually adding back all those things (except serialism!) that were thrown away before, beginning with harmony in Another Look at Harmony. His recent film scores seem conventional enough that most film-goers hardly notice them. I've overheard lovers of more conventional opera surprised by the "normalness" and "hummability" of Appomatox. The CD Songs and Poems for Solo Cello has won rave reviews for its overt romanticism, while also being compared to Bach.

I've often heard fans of "old" Glass music lamenting the changes and complaining that he has gone too conventional. Not so! Other composers have incorporated some of his ideas, as well as ideas from Reich, Riley, Adams, and others who once wrote mimimalist music, so that such music now is pretty conventional. But nothing has been lost in Glass' music. Everything good in 12 Parts is still there today. But so much more has been added, and the changes come faster and faster.

Performing such a work presents many challenges. There is a great deal of repetition, so it is easy to get lost and forget what you have or haven't played yet. Parts are very fast and relentless, with no stops for breath for the soprano or winds and no rests for the keyboards either.

Back in the 90's, when I was at university, I got a copy of the music for Metamorphosis for piano. Even though this is not one of my favorite Glass compositions, not by a long shot, it was one of the few for solo piano, so it was all I had to work with. I played it over and over and over, trying to get it right.

I was also playing lots of Hanon exercises at that time, as well as some other highly difficult music. The end result was, I very much damaged my hands. I'm not sure whether it was simple repetitive stress injury, or the onset of focal dystonia. But I would get pains in my wrists, and my fingers would simply refuse to obey my commands.

So it was probably a good thing that when I moved to California, I had to give up my piano. (I still found one to practice on; just not as often.) I eventually bought a digital piano, but by then I'd learned my lesson. I listen to my hands when they tell me they can't take any more, and I stay the hell away from Hanon. Plus, after a year of jazz piano lessons, I'm much better at seeing notes as parts of chords, rather than just as individual notes, and that reduces the stress on my brain in those fast bits.

A few weeks ago, I started playing Metamorphosis 4 in the morning. Through some miracle, I actually made it through the whole thing with no significant mistakes, except some accidentally skipped repetitions near the 10 minute mark. Because of my experience with injuring my hands before, I will not attempt it again trying for perfection. This will have to stand as my last word on this piece for some time.

In fact, I shortened the piece for the web to about 7 minutes, so you won't even get to hear the part where I skipped a bit, not that you would likely notice it anyway. Even so, this is almost at the file size limit that my host will accept!

Enjoy!

If you want the effect of the full piece, you can play it twice in a row! The full version has the form xAyBxAyBxAx, which I shortened to xAyBxAx.

Parts x and A are nominally in 4/4, while y an B are in 3/4. I think a certain ambiguity is part of the point of this piece, so I intentionally do not emphasize the first note of each measure. As there are distracting other rhythms going on, you won't likely notice that change from 4 to 3 explicitly. But you will notice that the center section seems much faster than the rest, though the pulse is constant throughout.

Although this piece takes 7 pages in normal notation, I was able to compress it comfortably onto two hand-written pages, though I use some unconventional notation. (See image). When I first realized that was possible, I was dismayed to find there is seemingly so little there. But there must be something there, since I'm still enjoying playing 15 years later!